Every business owner at the stage of its formation or promotion thinks about who will buy the goods or services? Any advertising, store, website is tailored specifically to potential customers. For example, opening an auto parts store in a residential area will not be appropriate, but near gas stations on major highways, in business centers of the city, where a large concentration of cars will bring profit.
Concluding the target audience is A term used in marketing to refer to a group of people who share common interests, topics, and needs. In simple terms, these are people who could become potential customers for your brand.
But on this target audience definition does not end. The target audience has the depth, sectors, unique characteristics, and opportunities to build a successful and successful advertising campaign.
In this article we will consider all tools for target audience analysisso that the development of your own business is truly effective, and advertising only increases the number of potential customers.
Why do you need to find your own target audience?
This is one of the main requirements that the customer puts forward to the marketer, namely the correct search and analysis of the target audience. This allows you to create unique offers for products and services based on people's needs, which means they will sell well.
It makes finding new customers much easier, remember that the more likely buyers there are, the higher the percentage of actual purchases.
The ability to form a loyalty program for regular customers, which is the lion's share of sales, because a satisfied customer, especially one who trusts the company, brings their friends and acquaintances to it and advertises you for free.
What types of CA are there?
Before that how to determine the target audience You need to understand its types, and only then choose a strategy. In general, there are only two types. This is selling directly to the user (B2C) or working with other organizations (B2B).
In the first case, they focus on the overall, positive image of the brand, emotional images, and trust, and in the second, they emphasize technical details and arguments for the advantages of their products or services.
These types are also divided into main and additional. Here is an example: for the sale of children's toys, the main customers are parents, and additional ones can be organizers of children's parties, animators and various institutions for holding developmental circles or creative classes. And also audience segmentation is divided on characteristics such as demographic, behavioral, and psychological.
What is a client portrait and how to create one?
After you have determined the target audience model and the sector of potential users, you need to create a detailed description of your ideal client, this is called a portrait. It is very simple to create.
- We create a general image of a person who will buy your goods and services and be interested in the offer.
- Analyze what he will like the most and what problems he will be able to solve thanks to your business.
- Not only the age and gender of people are taken into account, but also psychological moods (goals, needs, desires, sadness, and pain).
Having thought through all the questions, you will get a real hero who will simply fall in love with your offer. Therefore, in order to correctly compose a portrait of the target audience, you need to know how to correctly segment the market and by what criteria it is done. target audience analysis.
General methods for determining target audience
There are many methods for segmenting the target audience, but the most commonly used are the 5Ws (five questions).
- What the buyer wants, what products he wants to purchase, the person's goals, and what he can achieve after receiving the desired product.
- Who are your buyers? What demographic and sociological characteristics do they meet?
- Where is your customer located and how does he spend his free time, how is it convenient for him to shop? In shopping malls, stores or via the Internet?
- When will people buy your offering, is there seasonality in your business?
- What is the person's motive for purchasing your services, why is it important to them and what motivates them?
In addition to the general five questions, you also need to analyze your competitors' clientele and draw up a portrait of them, determine where there are shortcomings and what can be improved. And a cool life hack these days is forums and social networks, where people share their opinions, dissatisfaction and show their desires and goals, with such an analysis you will get clear expectations and needs of future customers.
Let's divide target research audiences into several stages. For regular direct sales to the customer, the following factors need to be analyzed:
- Gender and age.
- Education, income level and field of activity.
- Marital status and cultural preferences.
- Main interests, hobbies, passions, etc.
For an example of work in the B2B sector, we create a questionnaire with the following questions:
- What does a company with such status and reputation do?
- How long has it been on the market?
- What values does it have?
- Who is the director or the person with whom business matters are resolved?
- What will be interesting for her about your proposal and the list of solved problems for the company?
When did you decide? who are your potential customers Now you need to think about their daily schedule. Of course, every entrepreneur launches advertising, and its timing is very important. Let's look at examples. A mother with two children takes the little ones to school and kindergarten in the morning, comes home to do housework, and picks up the children in the evening. You sell children's things or toys, so this is your main audience, the best time for various advertisements is from 10 to 16. In the morning and evening, the person will be busy, but during the day there will be time to browse social networks and consider your offers.
Men and women working without children are a different story. Free time is in the morning, evening, and during lunch break, and this is when you should be advertising to this audience.
How to find your audience in business?
There are many options for such requests, namely:
- Banner advertising on thematic sites.
- Email marketing
- Contextual advertising, SMM, content marketing.
- SEO promotion.
- Working under the CPA model and more.
- Your competitors' subscribers are already a ready-made target audience.
- For stores, beauty salons, restaurants, etc., mandatory geolocation on Google Maps is required.
- When publishing your ads on different platforms, specify hashtags that are close to your audience and your own business.
Independently collect data about your potential customers, their demographics, preferences, behavior, and needs. One effective way to conduct market research is through surveys, focus groups, or analysis of existing data.
Now you know how to segment the market correctly, but don't forget about the main mistake. This is creating a very general portrait of your target audience and stopping at existing customers. The market is always developing, new products, unique services, etc. appear. We should never forget about this, because the indicator of a successful business is its scaling.
For example, you started selling children's toys and found your fans, and then added children's clothing and shoes for different ages, newborn sets, underwear, bedding, hair accessories or cosmetics for toddlers to your sales. For each product and age of children, potential buyers will be different. After all, a woman with hope and a mother of two teenagers are different customers who have different priorities, incentives, motivation, free time and desires. Therefore, you should review the portrait of your future customers once a year, or every six months, depending on the variety of products.
